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ETERNAL SUCCESSORS ANNOUNCEMENTS AND SUPPORT THREAD

Michael Latham the Creator of Eternal Champions wants to know from you if we should bring back a game in the vein of Eternal Champions?
We currently have the opportunity with a team of FG vets, former Sega\SNK\Namco to do a new fighter, and we personally want to hear from you if you think we should do this.

Currently we are in the planning phase, and would be looking for community support and feedback to make the best product possible, but first do you wwant it?

Please post your opinions, feedback, and constructive thoughts, favorite memories, etc. What would you all like to see?

UPDATE 3/25/20171. We want to thank you all for the tremendous feedback and support we have gotten over the past week. We are happy with all feedback, and glad to know there are so many of you that still love EC. That being said we got 1400+ votes for yes and about 50 or so for no on a reboot. I wonder if we could get 10X that in the coming weeks? We need your help to make this happen. Michael, has been quite ill and apologizes for the lack of info up to this point. Once he is back on his feet we will be organizing more updates.

Most importantly for this project to happen we need you! We are looking for Community Champions who can help us with constant feedback, even brutal feedback. Don't think we don't notice the ones of you who don't play or haven't played because if we can build something that you would play, this would be huge for us. So those who hated it, let us know what you feel would make it work in the market now, so we can make it even better.

UPDATE 4/12/2017We have been working on the plan for the game, as well as doing early visualization and mockups of how we envision the game. Obviously this is still early and we are getting more excited daily. We are considering what path to take with the project, but excited to share more with you as it develops. Michael has been sick for a few weeks now, but is on the road to recovery and getting back into the groove with us.

We are adding some visualization tests, we want to be open and transparent with some ideas, but nothing is decided but rather ask the community for feedback and see what gets you excited outside the core mechanics, which is obviously the most important part, and something we won't show until we feel its ready.

We are always going to try to offer some transparency throughout this process, to better give you all insight to what goes on internally, but also to make sure when we do move forward, its in the right direction.

Added 2 mockups in UE4, tests right now are to make it feel retro optionally in settings. Trying to tribute the color pallets of Ernie Chan and the original Sega titles.

UPDATE 4/27/2017 Our first official character, "Skinner Chen". We have left some hints in the text for the next announcements. The design is not final, but wanted to tell the story early and be transparent with everyone. Have a good weekend everyone!

Literally just a few days ago I was tweeting about this game. Hell some months back I had even thought of using Unity to play around with a remake myself. I would absolutely LOVE to see this game come out again remade.

Eternal Champions was pretty unique and it had a story that was interesting for a fighter. I'd say yeah I'd love to see a next gen eternal champions. But only if you guys can get Bone Thugs N Harmony to do some musical tracks for it lol.

I'm all for an Eternal Champions reboot. If yall need one, go ahead and open that Kickstarter!

Keep the lore, keep the gore, keep the cool characters that lived then died throughout time. The gameplay can be overhauled. Just make sure it's very fun to play & watch, but also balanced & deep enough for competitive play. :#

I'd like another EC game, it holds a soft spot in my heart. I would love for it to be a deep, competitive fighter, but the sad truth is that complex fighting games don't sell well. If they did, the Virtua Fighter games would've sold like hot cakes. The fact that the last entry in the main series was released more than ten years ago should tell you something.

This generation of Call of Duty kids doesn't have the patience for a deep fighter. Make it shallow and accessible, and keep the gore. That's the recipe for commercial success. Just look at Mortal Kombat X.

ItsOne0 posted...
"Keep the lore, keep the gore, keep the cool characters that lived then died throughout time. The gameplay can be overhauled. Just make sure it's very fun to play & watch, but also balanced & deep enough for competitive play"

This. Especially if you can do a proper reboot, and not just a spiritual successor.

Personally, I'd love for it to be closer to the Sega CD versionot, with several of those characters included. On that note, I'd love for both the Champions to be playable as regular fighters.

i would totally play a new eternal champions, or heck, even an HD port. i never played the first ones but im trying to get better at cult-hit fighting games. if i could suggest where to go with it, customizability and accessibility are becoming more common in fighting games. but the most important things are overall gameplay design, and fun. good character-balance would be a good cherry-on-top but its less important

Yes, I had been thinking about this for years. Hell, I even came up with character/story concepts. I agree with keeping the lore, and the basic premise of lost souls needing a second chance. Only thing that I really really need for a nostalgia-gasm, is you HAVE to remix the main theme. I do not care about the other music, it was mostly forgettable, but the main theme....so...fucking...classic.

I would totally love the idea. They can even reuse the ideas they had prepared for the cancelled Sega Saturn sequel.

Btw, if you want some personal anectodes or memories, I can tell you that in my student folder I used to have Eternal Champions stickers. They belonged to this Panini sticker collection, which I actually finished (yeah, my younger self was quite "fixated" with the game) :

The state fatalities were always pretty cool. I spent quite a bit of time working out how they triggered. Xaviers fire would change from the standard orange and red flames to other colors of you'd seems the opponent into it using Rax's overload attack.

I'm all for a modern Eternal Champions game, especially if Senator makes an appearance as a Secret Boss character with his awesome theme music.

To this day, EC is still the best storyline I've seen for a fighting game. It is the only fighting game where I made the effort to play with every character just to see how their lives played out if they didn't end prematurely. Really liked the endings of Xavier, Raven, Larcen, Jetta, Slash and Dawson. Good times, man.

There's only so much you can learn playing against the computer
PSN Screen Name : Arjay9975

This is the honest opinion of someone who played both versions of the game a lot in childhood, and now I don't think its gameplay still holds at all.

If you guys really want to revive the title, take Mortal Kombat 2011 as your best example of what to follow.
Eternal Champions has unforgiving difficult and it exploited a few moves of the characters to be playable both against the CPU as other player (just look at youtube and you can easily notice). Scrap this, make the moves with easier inputs, not necessarily like Street Fighter, and bring back what makes each character individual but working the necessary to make them fit the new gameplay, like Xavier's gold magic, Trident's colored barriers and so.
EC had a great advantage over MK in art direction back on the day, with great sprite work and very different style of fighters and stages thanks to its theme. It's a colorful game despise the violence. Try to not change this much, but scrap the ridiculous things like some secret characters from the Sega CD game (animals, Senator and Xavier with a face-swap). Also it has a great soundtrack, paired with Killer Instinct qualitywise, mainly the Mega Drive version, but the Sega CD also have some killer tracks like the themes of Midknight and Ramses. Don't try to modernize this like Capcom is doing with SF, just do like the team would have done back in that generation.
It have a exaggerated number of fatalities and they could be resumed for the sake of a better cost-effective player experience, without kill the trademark gore. Again, look at MK and not KI, which removed them in favor of a more family friendly game.
For the last, do a robust story mode, preferentially retelling the events of the original games since they're almost obscure by this day, and focus on the online component. Don't be like Capcom or Netherrealm in this one, look at what Microsoft achieved with KI.

That's all. Good luck and would be cool if you guys share a few more details, like if Sega is planed to join the production or if you're following the new ToeJam & Earl way.

If you guys really want to revive the title, take Mortal Kombat 2011 as your best example of what to follow.

Ugh, please don't. NRS's games are full of questionable decisions (not using hit stun, using 3D hit detection, bad meter management in all their games) and decisions on top of those to try to justify those decisions, and shouldn't really be seen as a standard to be copied.

Do follow the success of Mortal Kombat 9 and MKX closely. At the end of the day, it's the best selling fighting game right now. Of course MK isn't perfect, but clearly they're doing more things right than wrong. When it comes offering the "full package" to consumers, be more like MK than any other fighting game on the market.

Do follow SF4/3rd Strike/MVC3 when comes to creating a fighting game with a long shelf life and building a dedicated competitive scene. You don't want to have to keep making new content post-launch just to keep the game alive. Make sure the gameplay is deep enough for players to be stuck in training mode for hours. Of course make the game easily accessible to pick up and play, but make sure there's a deep side of the pool & its loaded with discovery.

Do look to Killer Instinct & Netherrealm when it comes to community outreach. Listen to us, keep us informed, be consistent, frequent the message boards, build hype, do Twitch streams.

Do have solid netcode. Killer Instinct and Skullgirls are my best examples. The "pass/fail"connection stress tests before going into Ranked Matches in KI(PC) is genius. Punish rage quitters at launch.

Do make the game FUN. Make cool looking characters with personality, make it flashy, make it violent, make it look like cool stuff is always happening. Learning curves are alot easier to climb when it's fun climbing them.

Don'ts:

Don't launch this game half-baked like Killer Instinct & SFV. First impressions are too important, and a lot of the FGC is super fickle about anything that's not Street Fighter, so there isn't a lot of room for mistakes here. Take your time and launch with a roster no less than 16 characters, with standard single-player features, and with solid netcode.

Don't over patch the game like Mortal Kombat 9 and X. Of course, patch blatant infinites and glitches, but don't go overboard trying to balance the game every month. Let the game evolve a bit on its own, let the community solve some of these match-up problems.

That's all for now. Whether it's a new Eternal Champions game, or a new IP in vein of EC, I'm excited about what you all can come up with.

Do follow SF4/3rd Strike/MVC3 when comes to creating a fighting game with a long shelf life and building a dedicated competitive scene. You don't want to have to keep making new content post-launch just to keep the game alive. Make sure the gameplay is deep enough for players to be stuck in training mode for hours. Of course make the game easily accessible to pick up and play, but make sure there's a deep side of the pool & its loaded with discovery.

Wouldn't the opposite be better for a smaller game by a smaller company. A lot of smaller indies do this (SFV notwithstanding) and it allows for them to have a smaller development budget and it allows the game to keep growing beyond its initial scope, while continuing to earn money for additional content and patches for it (e.g. Skullgirls).

Do follow SF4/3rd Strike/MVC3 when comes to creating a fighting game with a long shelf life and building a dedicated competitive scene. You don't want to have to keep making new content post-launch just to keep the game alive. Make sure the gameplay is deep enough for players to be stuck in training mode for hours. Of course make the game easily accessible to pick up and play, but make sure there's a deep side of the pool & its loaded with discovery.

Wouldn't the opposite be better for a smaller game by a smaller company. A lot of smaller indies do this (SFV notwithstanding) and it allows for them to have a smaller development budget and it allows the game to keep growing beyond its initial scope, while continuing to earn money for additional content and patches for it (e.g. Skullgirls).

Im not saying there should be no additional content and patches, I'm saying that the game shouldn't be too DEPENDENT on additional content and patches to maintain hype & keep the game alive.

You don't want to be in a situation where the foundation of your fighting game is so weak that the DLC character that you've been developing for 6 months only earns you one week of new buzz after release. You want everything, from the base game to the DLC, to be a slowburn; that way the devs will have the time to work on quality future updates without feeling the pressure of the game dying prematurely.

A good analogy would be that you want your fighting game to live "paycheck to paycheck", and if you miss one week of work, you get evicted. Lol

Personally I liked the SF4 model of releasing expansions instead of individual characters. I feel like it was the perfect amount of content at once to keep me interested and make the wait worth it.

Now that companies do a character at a time I'm like ok hype for this character, ehhhh I don't really like the character back to the same old same old. Wash rinse repeat until a character drops I actually like.

When its expansion based I'm like whaoh I like this old characters changes, I want to try them out , I like these new characters I want to try them out, this new stage is cool, I like this feature. It gives me different avenues to explore new and old parts of the game and THEN get set on what I like. Its a far less disposable experience.

Just because your buff, don't play tuff Cause I'll reverse the earth and turn your flesh back to dust

Personally I liked the SF4 model of releasing expansions instead of individual characters. I feel like it was the perfect amount of content at once to keep me interested and make the wait worth it.

Now that companies do a character at a time I'm like ok hype for this character, ehhhh I don't really like the character back to the same old same old. Wash rinse repeat until a character drops I actually like.

When its expansion based I'm like whaoh I like this old characters changes, I want to try them out , I like these new characters I want to try them out, this new stage is cool, I like this feature. It gives me different avenues to explore new and old parts of the game and THEN get set on what I like. Its a far less disposable experience.

The problem with that is that it costs more to do a full expansion than just smaller bits of content at a time.

Should you bring back a game in the vein of Eternal Champions? The answer is...YES!...PLEASE!!...I'VE BEEN WAITING 20+ YEARS!!!

In my opinion, no other fighter has had as varied, interesting, and at the same time cool cast of characters (Killer Instinct is the closest...though...they stole Hisako from me...that was my idea!)

Anyways, Eternal Champions is the ONLY time EVER in a fighting game where I have genuinely cared about each fighter & was curious to see how their stories all played out! The backstory of why the characters are fighting each other & all of the characters biographies (that music) are second to none!

Oh! Another thing I absolutely loved was the music...I mean...just listen to this:

Is that not THE GREATEST MAIN THEME IN FIGHTING GAME HISTORY!? The only other one that comes close or ties it is again (IMO) Killer Instinct! Also, I know most prefer the soundtrack of Challenge From The Dark Side because it was CD quality, but I preferred the soundtrack of the original. The new themes for the new fighters were cool, but the new tracks for the original cast were a step down with the exception of maybe Jetta Maxx. It just didn't capture the essence of the characters the way I felt the original soundtrack did. Those melodies are engraved in my head man!

Ok, despite me loving all that stuff, the one thing that always bugged me about the original Eternal Champions was that I was never any good at the game. The mechanics just never clicked with me. I mean, I did beat the game, but it always felt like it was by luck! However, I revisited the game recently and now I feel that I was just never playing the game the way it was meant to be played. I was always trying to play it like Street Fighter, but I think learning each characters normals are crucial to having success in Eternal Champions. Especially when you consider the fact that each fighters style is based on an actual martial art. Anyways, long-story-short, I can now say I appreciate Eternal Champions distinctive fighting mechanics!

Last thing, I know a lot of people probably hated it, but I think the final showdown against the Eternal Champion (EC1) is the greatest, most epic final boss fight of all time! 5 different forms & that music!...WOW!

Anyways, thank you Michael Latham & everybody else on the team who contributed to the franchise! I just wish there were something you could do, or that we could do in order for you guys to get the license from Sega. Oh God...does that mean you can't use the main theme either? I will support regardless, but here's hoping something can be worked out.

Oh man, I loved EC on Genesis as a kid... More so than Street Fighter.

If you kept it 2D and sold it on the PS4, consider one game sold over here, no matter what.

A couple of additional requests, if I may:

- Please keep the violent stage endings, and keep them so they only trigger in very specific ways (as before). They don't need to be gory or too graphic though, and every stage should have one, in my opinion.

- Please keep the original cast (and maybe add a few more characters). I agree that there should be at least 16 characters, but honestly, a few more wouldn't hurt.

- Please keep combos ground-based. I'm not a fan of air juggling combos because they're so unrealistic, and I don't think they would fit EC's style.

- I remember EC's game speed was a little quick... I think a bit quicker than Street Fighter 2 on normal speed, please keep it that way. The faster, the better, in my opinion.

- I do recall the special moves were a little difficult to execute. I think if they could be a bit easier, it would attract more people, but at the same time, I don't think you need to "dumb it down" too much.

- Please have decent single-player, offline content at launch... A Story Mode, Arcade Mode, Training, and maybe a few extra challenge or time trial modes. I think Street Fighter V proved that having low single player content at launch deters the casual gamer and hurts sales. If you can also unlock content (characters, stages, etc.) by playing the game, all the better.